Lesson plan

SAIL (programming language)

SAIL, the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Language, was developed by Dan Swinehart and Bob Sproull of the Stanford AI Lab. It was originally a large ALGOL 60-like language for the PDP-10 and DECSYSTEM-20. The language combined the earlier PDP-6/-10 language GOGOL compiler, essentially an integer-only version of ALGOL, with the associative store from the LEAP language. The first release was in November 1969 and it saw continued development into the 1980s, including a commercial derivative, MAINSAIL. SAIL's main feature is a symbolic data system based upon an associative store based on LEAP by Jerry Feldman and Paul Rovner. Items may be stored as unordered sets or as associations (triples). Other features include processes, procedure variables, events and interrupts, contexts, backtracking and record garbage collection. It also has block-structured macros, a coroutining facility and some new data types intended for building search trees and association lists.

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Article summary

SAIL, the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Language, was developed by Dan Swinehart and Bob Sproull of the Stanford AI Lab. It was originally a large ALGOL 60-like language for the PDP-10 and DECSYSTEM-20. The language combined the earlier PDP-6/-10 language GOGOL compiler, essentially an integer-only version of ALGOL, with the associative store from the LEAP language. The first release was in November 1969 and it saw continued development into the 1980s, including a commercial derivative, MAINSAIL. SAIL's main feature is a symbolic data system based upon an associative store based on LEAP by Jerry Feldman and Paul Rovner. Items may be stored as unordered sets or as associations (triples). Other features include processes, procedure variables, events and interrupts, contexts, backtracking and record garbage collection. It also has block-structured macros, a coroutining facility and some new data types intended for building search trees and association lists.

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  1. Summarise the article in your own words. Which single claim would you verify first, and why?
  2. Which claim in this article is most likely to be revised as the sources update? How would you check its current status?
  3. If two sources disagreed about one of these facts, what would you need in order to trust one over the other?

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